The Edible Woman

involved me. You involved me psychologically. I’ll have to think of myself as a father now, it’s indecent, and all because you” – he gasped: the idea was a novel one for him – “you seduced me!” He waved his beer bottle at her. “Now I’m going to be all mentally tangled up in Birth. Fecundity. Gestation. Don’t you realize what that will do to me? It’s obscene, that horrible oozy…”

“Don’t be idiotic,” Ainsley said. “It’s perfectly natural and beautiful. The relationship between mother and unborn child is the loveliest and closest in the world.” She was leaning in the doorway, gazing towards the window. “The most mutually balanced…”

“Nauseating!” interjected Len.

Ainsley turned on him angrily. “You’re displaying the classic symptoms of uterus envy. Where the hell do you think you came from, anyway? You’re not from Mars, you know, and it may be news but your mother didn’t find you under a cabbage plant in the garden either. You were all curled up inside somebody’s womb for nine months just like everybody else, and…”

Len’s face cringed. “Stop!” he cried. “Don’t remind me. I really can’t stand it, you’ll make me sick. Don’t come near me!” he yelped, as Ainsley took a step towards him. “You’re unclean!”

Marian decided he was becoming hysterical. He sat down on the arm of the chesterfield and covered his face with his hands. “She made me do it,” he muttered. “My own mother. We were having eggs for breakfast and I opened mine and there was, I swear there was a little chicken inside it, it wasn’t born yet, I didn’t want to touch it but she didn’t see, she didn’t see what was really there, she said Don’t be silly, it looks like an ordinary egg to me, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t and she made me eat it. And I know, I know there was a little beak and little claws and everything…” He shuddered violently. “Horrible. Horrible, I can’t stand it,” he moaned, and his shoulders began to heave convulsively.

Marian blushed with embarrassment, but Ainsley gave a maternal coo of concern and hurried to the chesterfield. She sat down beside Len and put her arms around him, pulling him down so that he was resting half across her lap with his head against her shoulder. “There, there,” she soothed. Her hair fell down around their two faces like a veil, or, Marian thought, a web. She rocked her body gently. “There, there. It’s not going to be a little chicken anyway, it’s going to be a lovely nice baby. Nice baby.”

Marian walked out to the kitchen. She was coldly revolted: they were acting like a couple of infants. Ainsley was getting a layer of blubber on her soul already, she thought; aren’t hormones wonderful. Soon she would be fat all over. And Len had displayed something hidden, something she had never seen in him before. He had behaved like a white grub suddenly unearthed from its burrow and exposed to the light of day. A repulsive blinded writhing. It amazed her though that it had taken so little, really, to reduce him to that state. His shell had not been as thick and calloused as she had imagined. It was like that parlour trick they used to play with eggs: you put the egg endwise between your locked hands and squeezed it with all your might, and the egg wouldn’t break; it was so well balanced that you were exerting your force against yourself. But with only a slight shift, an angle, a re-adjustment of the pressure, the egg would crack, and skoosh, there you were with your shoes full of albumin.

Now Len’s delicate adjustment had been upset and he was being crushed. She wondered how he had ever managed to avoid the issue for so long, to persuade himself that his own much-vaunted sexual activities could have nothing whatever to do with the manufacture of children. What would he have done then if the situation had been as he first imagined it, and he had got Ainsley pregnant by accident? Would he have been able to play guilt off against a blamelessness based on no-intent-to-injure, have let them cancel each other out and escaped unscathed? Ainsley couldn’t have foreseen his reaction. But it was her decision that was responsible for this crisis. What was she going to do with him now? What should she do?

Oh well, she thought, it’s their problem, let them solve it; I’m well out of it anyway. She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

The next morning, however, when she opened her soft-boiled egg and saw the yolk looking up at her with its one significant and accusing yellow eye, she found her mouth closing together like a frightened sea anemone. It’s living; it’s alive, the muscles in her throat said, and tightened. She pushed the dish away. Her conscious mind was used to the procedure by now. She sighed with resignation and crossed one more item off the list.

19

“There’s jelly, salmon, peanut butter and honey, and egg salad,” Mrs. Grot said, shoving the platter almost under Marian’s nose – not because she was being rude but because Marian was sitting on the chesterfield and Mrs. Grot was standing up, and the assemblage of vertebrae, inflexible corsetry, and desk-oriented musculature that provided Mrs. Grot with her vertical structure would not allow her to bend very far over.

Marian drew herself back into the soft chintz cushions. “Jelly, thanks,” she said, taking one.

It was the office Christmas party, which was being held in the ladies’ lunchroom where they could be, as Mrs. Gundridge had put it, “more comfy.” So far their comfiness, all-permeating as it was in these close quarters, had been tempered by a certain amount of suppressed resentment. Christmas fell on a Wednesday this year, which meant that they all had to come back to work on Friday, missing by a single day the chance of a gloriously long weekend. It was the knowledge of this fact however that had, Marian was sure, put the twinkle in Mrs. Grot’s spectacles and even infused her with gaiety enough to sustain this unprecedentedly social sandwich-passing. It’s because she wants to take a good close look at our sufferings, Marian thought, watching the rigid figure as it progressed around the room.

The office party seemed to consist largely of the consumption of food and the discussion of ailments and bargains. The food had all been brought by the ladies themselves: each of them had agreed to provide a certain item. Even Marian had been pressured into promising some chocolate brownies, which she had actually bought at a bakery and switched to a different bag. She had not felt much like cooking lately. The food was heaped on the table that stood at one end of the lunchroom – much more food than they needed really, salads and sandwiches and fancy breads and desserts and cookies and cakes. But since everyone had brought something, everyone had to eat at least some of everything, or else the contributor would feel slighted. From time to time one or another of the ladies would shriek, “Oh Dorothy, I just have to try some of your Orange-Pineapple Delight!” or “Lena, your Luscious Fruit Sponge looks just scrummy!” and heave to her feet and trundle to the table to refill her paper plate.

Marian gathered that it had not always been like this. For some of the older girls, there was a memory, fast fading to legend, of a time when the office party had been a company-wide event; that was when the company had been much smaller. In those far-off days, Mrs. Bogue said mistily, the men from upstairs had come down, and they even had drinks. But the office had expanded, finally things reached a stage at which nobody knew everybody any longer, and the parties started to get out of hand. Small ink-stained girls from Mimeo were pursued by wandering executives, there were untimely revelations of smouldering lusts and concealed resentments, and elderly ladies had a papercupful too much and hysterics. Now, in the interests of all-over office morale, each department had its own office party; and Mrs. Gundridge had volunteered earlier that afternoon that it was a lot comfier this way anyhow, just all us girls here together, a comment which had produced glutinous murmurs of assent.

Marian was sitting wedged between two of the office virgins; the third was perched on the arm of the chesterfield. In situations like this, the three of them huddled together for self-protection: they had no children whose cutenesses could be compared, no homes whose furnishings were of much importance, and no husbands, details of whose eccentricities and nasty habits could be exchanged. Their concerns were other, though Emmy occasionally contributed an anecdote about one of her illnesses to the general conversation. Marian was aware that her own status among them was doubtful – they knew that she was on the fringe of matrimony and therefore regarded her as no longer genuinely single, no longer able to empathize with their problems – but in spite of their slight coolness towards her she still preferred being with them to joining any of the other groups. There was little movement in the room. Apart from the platter-passers, most of the ladies remained seated, in various clusters and semicircles, re-clumping themselves every now and then by an exchange of chairs. Mrs. Bogue alone circulated, bestowing a sociable smile here, a mark of attention or a cookie there. It was her duty.

She was working at it the more assiduously because of the cataclysm that had taken place earlier in the day. The giant city-wide instant-tomato-juice taste test, in the offing since October but constantly delayed for further refinements, had been due to go out that morning. A record number of interviewers, almost the whole available